Spectacular LTE performance supports fireworks display

Imagine the scene: A million people gathered at a beach for a renowned annual fireworks display in Korea. As a spectacular lightshow cascaded across the sky, an estimated 300,000 of them were able to share the experience with friends and family on LTE-enabled smartphones.

With three operators offering mobile broadband services over three different LTE networks, the October 2012 festival has been billed as the world’s largest LTE-enabled event.

Mobile traffic was extremely heavy in the area, and there could hardly have been a better opportunity to test the performance of early LTE networks from three different vendors. And that’s exactly what happened.

The findings from the independent tests are decisive. As the audience browsed news reports and sent and received videos and photos from the event, the Nokia Siemens Networks network outperformed the other networks by a wide margin, delivering a minimum 34 Mbps downlink data throughput. This translated into data services that were about 2-3 times faster than the two other networks could provide. Data call completion rates were higher on the Nokia Siemens Networks system too, remaining at 100% at all times while the other networks suffered severe drop off in completion rates at several times during the festival.

As well as a network built on world-leading hardware and software, a key to the success for Nokia Siemens Networks was meticulous pre-event planning in conjunction with the operator, starting weeks before the festival. Covering everything from setting up remote support to an in-depth study on the traffic volumes expected, the Nokia Siemens Networks and operator teams had it completely covered. All of which helped the event to go off with a bang.